Keeping a career going into your eightieth year is no mean feat and even more impressive is to be still producing interesting and relevant work of a fine quality. Someone who is achieving this in my humble opinion, and then some, is the artist David Hockney.
A quick look through his back catalogue shows a wide and varied collection of work using various mediums, from acrylic paint to Polaroid cameras and beyond.
The queues that formed for tickets at his recent shows at The Royal Academy testify to his sustained popularity. Touts were doing a roaring trade for his ‘A Bigger Picture’ show in 2012 for example, always a sign of your doing something right.
David Hockney was born in Bradford in 1937. From a working class background, his early interest in drawing led to him studying at The Bradford College of Art, before moving onto the Royal College of Art in London.
Once there he became a contemporary of Peter Blake and like Blake, Hockney was associated with the burgeoning Pop Art scene of the late 1950/ early 1960s, but in truth his work was already following a different path and was considered more expressionist in style.
Graduating in 1962, he went on to teach at Maidstone College of Art, but earlier trips to New York had him wanting to explore more of America and he eventually settled in California, and soon began a series of paintings in acrylic of Los Angeles swimming pools, which have become iconic Hockney work over the years.
He is openly gay, championing gay rights from his early days, eagerly embracing that lifestyle and using elements of it to infuse his work of the 60s and 70s
Perhaps his most famous piece is ‘Mr and Mrs Clark and Percy’ from 1970-71, which features textile designer Celia Birtwell and her then husband, fashion designer Ossie Clark.
From the mid 1970s he has also designed stage ‘drop’s for the opera world with his work appearing at all the big houses such as La Scala, The Met in New York and Glyndebourne in the UK.
The early 1980s saw Hockney produce a range of photo collages, working at first with Polaroid film and then moving onto 35mm. The process involved over-layering images taken of the same object/subject at different angles and times to achieve the finished ‘textured’ artwork.
He stumbled upon this effect, which he named ‘Joiners’ accidently and he immediately related the overall effect as being reminiscent of Cubism. While he explored this medium, he stopped painting for a while.
Before too long, he was experimenting once again, this time using a computer programme called the Quantel Paintbox.
On frequent trips back see his mother in Bradford in the 1990s, he began to paint his immediate locale and this led to a series of outdoor paintings of the surrounding countryside. These artworks gradually grew in size, as eventually he joined canvasses together to create one large overall painting.
In 2007 he finished the painting ‘Bigger Trees Near Warter’, which is painted on 50 canvasses leaving it 15 x 40 feet in size. This he donated it to the Tate Gallery in 2008.
Over recent years, he has produced hundreds of portraits of friends and family using different mediums including an iPhone App. He exhibited these at the Royal Academy in 2016
So, just calling David Hockney a painter, doesn’t really do him justice. His work in the fields of photography, printmaking, and stage designs are key elements, alongside his paintings over his art life over the past 60 years or so.
And he’s still at it. The boy from Bradford did well.
The Mumper of SE5
